Sygnia Recognized for the Third Consecutive Year in The Gartner 2024 Market Guide for Digital Forensics and Incident Response Retainer Services

DFIR services enable organizations to pre-arrange external expert assistance that accelerates containment and minimizes the impact of a major cyber attack. This marks the third consecutive year Sygnia has been recognized by Gartner.

The market guide highlights vendors that have garnered the most interest from Gartner clients over the past 12 months. Below we share our perspective of what sets Sygnia DFIR services apart, and why more customers are turning to Sygnia for help.

What Sets Sygnia’s DFIR Apart?

Attacker Perspective

Sygnia employs only highly experienced A-teams with extensive nation-state level cyber warfare backgrounds, offensive and defensive capabilities, and decades of incident response experience. Our teams have a profound understanding of attacker methodologies and our extensive experience defeating attacks in multiple verticals. Our teams are able react faster, out-think, out-maneuver and outpace attackers.

Technological Superiority and Agility

When responding to an attack, speed and agility are critical.  Our agile teams effectively respond to cyber incidents in any environment, with any IT or security stack. Our experience includes cloud, application, CI/CD, mobile, and OT. Sygnia has also developed an advanced, proprietary cross platform XDR that is used to augment the client’s existing security tools when needed. Sygnia’s Velocity XDR was built by responders for responders and is designed for rapid deployment into a wide range of environments, enabling our security teams to ‘hit the ground running’.

Parallel Execution of Multiple DFIR Workstreams

When an organization is under attack, every minute counts. Sygnia commences response activities in multiple workstreams to accelerate incident resolution. While this seems like a natural thing to do, our clients have repeatedly told us that our ability to execute multiple workstreams in parallel and rapidly contain breaches is exceptional.

Sygnia’s incident response methodology is built around parallel execution of all activities needed to defeat a major attack and minimize damage: rapid forensic investigation, containment, tactical negotiation with the attacker, remediation & recovery, executive crisis management, litigation support, and post-breach monitoring. In the sections below, we’ll provide a few details on each activity.

Executive Crisis Management

Sygnia teams with executive leadership to lead through the crisis and provide accurate answers to stakeholders, employees, and the public. In parallel with technical incident resolution streams, Sygnia supports executive crisis management including legal, regulatory, PR and internal crisis management activities.

Containment

It is critical to quickly ensure that areas of the environment that have not yet been impacted by the attack, will not be compromised. This can be achieved by segregating or quarantining them. Investigative findings are leveraged to rapidly contain the threat and prevent further damage to the business.

Investigation

Sygnia performs triage and investigation to identify the initial entry point, the scope of compromise, how the attack propagated through the environment, the tools used by the attacker, and the current threat level. Sygnia rapidly and accurately identifies attack vectors, timelines, and attacker capabilities that must be remediated.

Tactical Negotiation

Sygnia leverages expert negotiators to gain critical time and feed valuable information from the attacker back to the technical investigative team. This approach significantly lowers ransom demands and substantially improves the speed of technical investigation and recovery efforts.

Remediation and Recovery

Recovery efforts are initiated immediately, in parallel with the initial investigation. By leveraging a “secure island” environment in which key services are re-created before the compromised method has been cleared, the organization can return to full business operations much faster. The remediation effort identifies and closes security gaps, and the attacker’s presence in the environment is eradicated.

Threat Monitoring

Attackers may attempt additional malicious actions at any time. To minimize this risk, Sygnia’s incident response team performs tailored monitoring throughout and after an incident, to ensure additional malicious activities and re-entry attempts are detected and blocked immediately.

Reporting and Regulatory Compliance

Sygnia produces comprehensive reports that detail the threats that the client faced, the steps that were taken to prevent and contain breaches, adverse impacts to operations, and forensic details about the attack. These reports make it much easier for our clients to meet regulatory reporting requirements and can also support legal action against identified attackers. They can also serve as an initial guide for post-breach resilience enhancement measures.

Deep Experience in Multiple Industry Verticals

Sygnia has deep experience in multiple industry verticals, enabling us to be very familiar with the IT and OT architectures commonly deployed by clients in those industries, as well as the threats and TTP’s that organizations in those industry verticals typically face. Sygnia works with leading organizations, including multiple Fortune 500’s, in finance, healthcare, industrial and critical infrastructures, legal, logistics and transportation, online retail, technology, telecom, and education.

SYGNIA’s Advanced Threat Research Team

Threat research and continuous monitoring of the global threat landscape is incorporated into Sygnia’s incident response efforts, ensuring effective forensic investigations, and revealing novel threat actors to the global security community.

Sygnia’s DFIR In Action: Achieving Optimal Outcomes

Sygnia’s approach to incident response and digital forensics is achieving optimal results for clients in multiple industries, across thousands of attacks. Below are snapshots of a few classes of cyber incidents, our response strategies, and links to specific case studies.

Beating Ransomware

The Sygnia team immediately mobilizes support across the six workstreams mentioned above. Working in parallel enables the rapid prevention of additional damage while creating a “secure island” to ensure the start of business recovery. The technical investigation team works together with our expert negotiators to achieve a full understanding of the attack kill chain and scope of compromise, facilitating well informed strategic decision-making. Through this approach, business leaders can lead through the crisis and effectively return to a secure, fully operational environment.

Case study: Eradicating A Persistent Attacker

Containing Data Breaches

Sygnia’s approach to these incidents is driven by our proven ability to determine the scope of compromise, including identification of all malicious points of access, and mapping of the chain of events that led to data loss or will lead to data loss if not contained. Once this understanding is established, complete kill-switch events are designed to simultaneously remove all malicious access to the organization and ensure that persistent actors cannot re-enter. The Sygnia team also provides continuous litigation support to ensure that any legal and regulatory fallout from the data breach is fully addressed with the necessary forensic evidence and expertise

Case study: Data Breach Remediated and Resilience Enhanced

Stopping Financial Crime

Whether it’s cryptocurrency or international bank transactions, gift cards or ATM manipulation, the Sygnia team moves immediately to identify and remediate the key systems being targeted. A comprehensive forensic investigation enables the establishment of new anti-fraud mechanisms, tailored monitoring to detect and prevent future attacks, and identification of key single points-of failure in financial systems. Once identified, secure design principles are applied to mitigate these risks and protect the organization

Case study: BEC Remediation and Post-attack Resilience Enhancement

Case study: Stopping A Dangerous Supply Chain Attack

Defeating Nation-state Attacks

Over the years, Sygnia has protected leading global businesses facing multiple nation-state attackers and APTs. These attacks, perpetrated by highly sophisticated actors, often employ zero-day vulnerabilities and unlimited resources to reach their goals. They bypass standard defenses and require specialized incident response methodologies. The Sygnia team includes experts with an in-depth understanding of attacker modus operandi and employs advanced tools to identify threat actors that are operating within organizational environments. Once an attack is investigated, remediation is performed in conjunction with in-depth defensive activities. Vigilance is maintained with advanced monitoring, to prevent a recurrence.

Case study: Defeating Multiple Simultaneous Attacks on a CSP

About Sygnia

Sygnia is the foremost global cyber readiness and response team, applying creative approaches and battle-tested solutions to help organizations beat attackers and stay secure. With a team of deep digital combat and enterprise security specialists, Sygnia enables companies to proactively build cyber resilience and defeat attacks within their networks. At each phase of the security journey, Sygnia delivers the tailored insight, technological acumen, and decisive action needed for their clients to be unstoppable in the face of cyber threats. Sygnia is a trusted advisor and service provider of technology and security teams, executives, and boards of leading organizations worldwide, including Fortune 100 companies. Sygnia is a Temasek company and part of the ISTARI Collective.